<p>Maybe I'm being cynical but I wonder how much colleges profit from encouraging ineligible students to apply. My son received mail from Yale today. Seriously, Yale? He's not even going to qualify as a National Merit semi-finalist. There is no way he could be competitive in admissions. Why give him (and others) the wrong impression unless it is just to put more application money in the coffers or to increase the reject rate and make a school appear more selective.</p>
<p>You got it. That’s exactly the game.</p>
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<p>Not just appear more selective, but help in the rankings as well. Admissions rate is one of the factors used by USN&WR in it’s annual college rankings.</p>
<p>A lot of schools farm out marketing to prospective applicants to outside businesses. These companies get paid on the number of mailings.</p>
<p>Why do they recruit so much?? Because they can.</p>
<p>This sort of discussion – which is all too common – is fundamentally misplaced. The elite colleges do not care at all about their USN&WR rankings. (OK, maybe they care a little, but no one would ever say so out loud.) Even if the rankings didn’t exist, encouraging the broadest possible applicant base is in the interest of both the college and the admissions staff.</p>
<p>For generations, the elite colleges were essentially the private preserve of . . . the elite. My class at Yale had something like 60 kids from Andover in it, and another 40 from Exeter, and equivalent numbers from Groton, Milton, St. Paul’s, Choate, etc. . . . on down to the provincial day school I attended that sent a mere 4 people (the top boys at which were absolutely entitled to pick any college they wanted). </p>
<p>At that time people were patting themselves on the back about how egalitarian the college had become, because it was no longer ALL prep school alumni, there were a bunch of public school students in there, and some of both sets were black, Jewish, Asian. With a college-age population not much lower than today’s – it was the absolute height of the baby boom – Harvard and Yale got about 1/3 of the applications they do today.</p>
<p>As time went on, the admissions people at the elite schools learned that lots of perfectly good candidates weren’t applying, in part because they didn’t understand that they WERE perfectly good candidates and thought that they didn’t have a chance, and in part because they didn’t understand that attending an elite college might provide benefits their state flagship didn’t offer. And this was especially true for students from working-class backgrounds, ethnic minorities, and families where previous generations hadn’t gone to college. So the colleges started spending money to publicize themselves to students as broadly as possible, so that they wouldn’t inadvertently exclude any diamond in the rough applicants.</p>
<p>And remember: You care a lot more about test scores than they do. They don’t want to tell kids “Don’t bother to apply if you don’t have 2200 SATs,” because every year they admit dozens of kids who don’t have 2200 SATs but do have other good qualities. That’s a tiny percentage of applicants with 2200 SATs, but so what? It’s what justifies their jobs as admissions professionals. It takes real work to find them!</p>
<p>JHS, I think your argument is totally disingenuous. Of course, they care about their selectivity rate. Irregardless of rankings, the elites are in competition with each other. Every year come April there are a slew of articles about admissions selectivity for the year and they know that perception becomes reality. If they really just wanted to find diamonds in the rough, there are many ways to go about that without mass mailings to juniors, the vast majority of whom have no real shot at these schools. I think it is ridiculous to suggest that they undertake these promotional campaigns for the benefit of the underprivileged (although in a very few cases that may be a bonus result).</p>
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<p>Yes, they do care. My son’s private college counselor said the big joke in the industry how quickly can Harvard get their acceptance rate to less than 1%. Everyone who works in the college admission business (from the college side to the HS counseling side) knows that is the #1 goal of the ‘elite’ colleges.</p>
<p>Whether parents are willing to acknowledge this or not is a different story.</p>
<p>“the elites are in competition with each other”</p>
<p>I agree that they’re in competition with one another, which is why they pay so much attention to marketing, but I don’t believe that competition is primarily about getting the lowest admit rate. It’s about finding, and recruiting, those diamond-in-the-rough superstars that everyone is going to want, especially minorities, first-generation college students, etc. who may have those mailings as their only source of info. The schools want the best-qualified class possible while still meeting all kinds of diversity goals (racial, geographic, and economic as well as academic, artistic, etc.).</p>
<p>If they really wanted to get their admissions rate down to 1%, all htey would have to do is drop the application fee to $1.</p>
<p>20000 applicants at $200 an application for <3000 or less spots = $4,000,000. Not bad.</p>
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I think the very top schools probably care as much about yield as they do about selectivity. Especially head-to-head yield comparisons. They’ve cared about that for decades.</p>
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<p>Sorry, again I this argument is disingenuous. What about all those personal visits by admissions officers to schools serving the underprivileged where they can absolutely show an interest in the star students who don’t normally think Ivy. That’s the way to zero in on the diamonds. A focused approach like that…maybe getting names from the schools themselves, is a much more efficient way to find those kids. </p>
<p>What about the pain they cause the very many kids who have their expectations raised by these mailings and don’t have the benefit of a parent or counselor to ground them in reality? I’ve seen many from my school who respond to this college courting practice, not with the attitude that it’s a long-shot and they might as well give it a try, but rather thinking they must have a good chance because the college has come to them.</p>
<p>Well, if you fill out the applicationa nd get rejected, since thse are Common Application schools you don’t lose any money becuase you can send that EXAT application to one of the litereally thousands of schools that join the Common Application every year. By paying just one application, you can apply to all these schools so even if you don’t get into the Ivy League school you might be scouted or accepted to another school that is less prestigious but is a perfect fit for you and might be also able to meet all of most of your need. I know because I am a financial aid advisor volunteer at my local high school where I graduated, and I have managed to get kids who might not have gotten into Harvard but can get into a great school with strong academics such as a LAC or their state flagship university and be able to pay for it without more than a few thousand dollars in private loans + Stafford loans who might not have originally gone to attend a -year college or university at a 4-year college ever in their lives and now many of them are working. Profitable jobs, too, and some of them are in trades such as plumbing or specialized whitecollar professions like lawyering and many of the kids working in plumbing are doing just as well or even better as the Guileford / Guilford trained lawyer (just a little pun from a Guilford alum).</p>
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<p>I agree that those schools care a lot about yield and compete that way, but the general population is unfamiliar with the concept of yield…what they hear about is acceptance rate. And that is the wider audience where perception of prestige really matters.</p>
<p>Bedoin said, “since thse are Common Application schools you don’t lose any money becuase you can send that EXAT application to one of the litereally thousands of schools that join the Common Application every year. By paying just one application, you can apply to all these schools”</p>
<p>I wish this were true, but it’s not. When you send the Common App to multiple schools you also have to pay each school’s application fee. For my son’s choices the fees ranged from $50 to $75 per school, not the $200 quoted above.</p>
<p>That’s true, however that can be ameliorated by CollegeBoard and NACAC fee waivers which I and most guidance counselors at most high schools can certify for. You can get 4 COllegeBoard fee waivers, and once htrose are expended you can negotiate to certain schools who will take applications free online, or free if you do a campus visit, or will ust waive the fee if you have need.</p>
<p>I absolutely agree that they care about head-to-head victories, and to a lesser extent about overall yield. (In reality, there isn’t much difference at the top – almost all of the admits HYPS schools lose are going to one of the other HYPS schools, or maybe MIT.)</p>
<p>I absolutely disagree that they care about their low admission rate.</p>
<p>The metric they may care about (and which winds up amounting to the same thing) is how many applicants they attract. That’s worth competing over, because it’s seen as measuring their broad appeal, and also ensuring that they will be selecting the best of the best from all over, not just some privileged social subset. Plus, pulling applications in represents measurable success for admissions staff tasked with promoting the school, and ensures that they have something to do during the winter, since giving all those applications a fair, holistic consideration requires a LOT of professional staff.</p>
<p>But they do NOT want to pull in random applications – their superiors are going to judge them on whether they pull in qualified applications. And, by and large, they do. The big issue isn’t that they get unqualified kids to apply. The issue is that there are a lot of qualified kids, who are then hurt when they aren’t selected. Maybe somewhere there are a bunch of unqualified kids applying to Harvard, but at the schools I know that just doesn’t happen.</p>
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<p>JHS, I recognize that Northwestern doesn’t quite fall into the stratosphere of the elite historical-WASP playground, but it’s close enough for most purposes, and so you might be interested in something that happened just 2 days ago.</p>
<p>Received a phone call from NU (a student) asking for donations, which of course, is nothing unique or out of the ordinary. When I responded that I wasn’t able to give at the present time, the student responded (obviously from a script) that it wasn’t important how much I gave but that I gave, and that the % of alums who gave would impact the USNWR ranking. Yes, she used those words. I politely demurred and hung up, but was amazed that they actually said this out loud. Take that for what it’s worth.</p>
<p>Sorry, Pizzagirl. Northwestern IS close enough for lots of purposes, but not for purposes of whether it cares about USNWR rankings. Northwestern cares. Northwestern (and WashU, Vanderbilt, Duke, USC, and recently Chicago) has gotten a lot of mileage out of caring.</p>